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Description
The dramatic story of the real-life murder that inspired the birth of modern detective fiction. In June of 1860 three-year-old Saville Kent was found at the bottom of an outdoor privy with his throat slit. The crime horrified all England and led to a national obsession with detection, ironically destroying, in the process, the career of perhaps the greatest detective in the land. At the time, the detective was a relatively new invention; there were only eight detectives in all of England and rarely were they called out of London, but this crime was so shocking, as Kate Summerscale relates in her scintillating new book, that Scotland Yard sent its best man to investigate, Inspector Jonathan Whicher. Whicher quickly believed the unbelievable—that someone within the family was responsible for the murder of young Saville Kent. Without sufficient evidence or a confession, though, his case was circumstantial and he returned to London a broken man. Though he would be vindicated five years later, the real legacy of Jonathan Whicher lives on in fiction: the tough, quirky, knowing, and all-seeing detective that we know and love today…from the cryptic Sgt. Cuff in Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone to Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade. The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher is a provocative work of nonfiction that reads like a Victorian thriller, and in it Kate Summerscale has fashioned a brilliant, multilayered narrative that is as cleverly constructed as it is beautifully written.
Customer reviews for 'The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher: A Shocking Murder and the Undoing of a Great Victorian Detective'
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The Suspicions of Mr Whicher
This is a well written book. I was surprised to find myself propelled forward throughout as it is a combination of the details of an historical event and yet is a mystery. I thought that the writer captured the life of the people and the beliefs of the time very well.
This is a good read
[Thursday, October 02, 2008]
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An Elegant Overview
Using a sensational murder case as a magnifying glass, the author elegantly explores links between literature and society. The subtitle ought however, to be the making of the great detective genre. The case was certainly unthinkable: one summer night i 1860 a small boy is lifted from his bed, his throat slit, and his body dumped in the servants' privy. All the evidence suggests the murderer is a member of the household. The Kent family was what we would call blended, infantren of two marriages living w/ the father and his second wife. But this blend was clearly lethal. The Kent murder was the O. J. Simpson murder of its day, and the case reverberated throughout Victorian society. The author tells a compelling tale, using the mystery-genre's techniques of judicially parcelling out information. As w/ many mysteries, the middle of the book sags, but her conjectures at the end, supporting Detective Whicher's initial conclusions, are undeniably convincing. This is a broad and imaginative book, well told. If nothing else, the photograph of the old lady who lived to be 100 will keep you going through the pages.
[Wednesday, October 01, 2008]
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Are we reading the same book?
I only made it through the first half of this yawner. Given the subject matter and the author's unquestionable dedication to her research, there is a good deal of potential in this book. Unfortunately, author's proclivity for extraneous details and commentary makes the book darn near inpenetrable.
After slogging through many random and unrelated "nuggets", I finally put down the book in frustration after growing tired of the author's habit of inserting quotes from famous ficticious detectives as if they were real authorities on the subject, and providing these "insights" without much in the way of comment to make a point.
As a fan of books about similar subjects and the same era (The Alienist, The Angel of Darkness, Devil in the White City, Thunderstruck) I was hoping this would be another good read. As other reviewers have said, it is a good story let down by poor editing. I would recommend Caleb Carr or Erik Larson as better alternatives to Ms. Summerscale.
[Monday, September 29, 2008]
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